


long way to zero, baby

by WeAreTomorrow



Category: Hemlock Grove, TiMER (2009)
Genre: AU, Crossover, M/M, True Love, timer - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-10 15:25:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/787562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeAreTomorrow/pseuds/WeAreTomorrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roman has a blank timer. Peter doesn't have one at all.</p><p>AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set in the TiMER universe:
> 
> "TiMER is a corporation specializing in a unique matchmaking device. For a nominal monthly fee, the company can equip anyone with a countdown timer that counts down to the point that the customer is brought into contact with his or her soul mate. The night before meeting a soul mate, the TiMER reaches zero, and will begin to beep when the soulmates make eye contact the following day."
> 
> (If you have any questions about this verse, please ask!)

Roman has a blank timer and this is just another reason he is different, cold, unattached.

In a small town like Hemlock, time is the best of gossip. They have the normal range at school, averaging eight point five years. There are the exceptions, notably the scandal about the cheerleader and her teacher. The first day of school last fall, the new twenty-something teacher had rushed in, apologizing for getting lost, saying, “My name is—“

Beep beep. And it was love.

The student was sixteen at the time. (She’ll never need to come out to her parents; this is one thing the timers have done for them, for humanity.)

There were others, people whose ticking numbers seemed too large to be meaningful. His sister for instance, was going to be forty-two. It didn’t matter to her at all; she cried when the screen lit up with numbers. Even their mother couldn’t hide her relief.

(His mother’s timer is a memory, a scarred wrist, off-limits.)

Roman has a blank, which is not unusual globally. They’re not cheap, just starting to trickle into third world countries—quite rapidly in India where the government has begun cheap installation programs—at first through desperate Americans with timers like his, but it’s proven to dramatically lower teenage pregnancies, child brides and the rate of rapes. It’s humanizing somehow, this scienfic-ation of love. Ironic, no?

Roman has always liked his blank timer, has never tried to hide it away under long sleeves, tucked under watches or fake skin patches. He might be a little addicted to his own bitterness, to his own sharp image.

The pity is useful sometimes, in getting what he wants. Between that and his money, he’s never had a problem getting laid.

XXX

Peter doesn’t have a timer; he’s Romani.

Running is in his DNA, coded in his genetic language, along with a few other surprises. Between his chronic averse to commitment, the expense (besides, even if he wanted to, it’s damn near impossible to steal a timer; he knows jackshit about installation anyway), and the fact that he is a fucking werewolf, it’s the best for all involved that he stay out of the true-love business.

His mother doesn’t talk about his dad but she keeps her wrists covered in bangles; it’s one of the few things they never talk about.

Most gypsies never get them, and it’s another bond tightening them together from an outside world infatuated with the possibility of concrete answers. He’s been brought up to question that kind of certainty. (Some people are drawn to it, to the fact he’s timeless; he’s gotten his fair share of fun out of it, anyway.) And whatever else it might be, it’s still an industry.

His virgin wrists are just another reason they don’t trust him in Hemlock.

It’s the same everywhere; all American towns are essentially the same blueprint. He settles in quickly, learns which nooks and crannies to haunt in his free time, which kids to ignore and which kids to fight.

He fits names to the stereotypes around him, to the countdown numbers, but only one really sticks—Roman.


	2. Chapter 2

An important thing to note about timers is that they are settled through a connection of the eyes.

 

Testing for the creation of Blind-friendly timers is currently underway, but making little progress. “Visual chemistry” remains a field full of questions, often sneered at by the older classes of relationship study, but there is no explaining away the power of eye-contact and it’s integral function in the true-love process.

 

Peter doesn’t know any of this, though he might find it interesting.

 

If someone told him, he might have thought about his first day of school, the recollection of smoke caught between lips, stationary, wide eyes framed with eyelashes, with bruises, throat caught in the motion of exhale.

 

Nobody tells him about the importance of eye-contact, but Peter finds himself thinking about it anyway.

 

XXX

 

“I’m a writer,” Christina Wendell announces, little bite-size girl with her pointed chin in the air, “Motivations are important to me.”

 

He takes his time answering, feeling her impatience build as he swishes a mouthful of gas-station beer in his mouth before swallowing. It’s still cold enough to drink slowly, and the condensation on the glass bottle leaves a wet mark above his ankle when he kicks one her way. Her mouth twists, partially in suprise but mostly with curiosity. Careful, it killed the cat, he's heard.

 

“No thank you,” she says, “So, why don’t you have a timer?”

 

Peter kicks back in his hammock; usually he tells people who ask to fuck off (another thing about timers he hates; suddenly your true love is everybody's buisness) but he likes her bluntness.

 

“Why do you want to know?”

 

She seems thrown by this line of thought, or maybe she is just unused to people not giving her answers. They all seem so young to him, the kids here and everywhere, ignorant as bliss or however the saying goes.

 

“Because it’s weird,” she answers, finally, unscrewing the beer. “Everybody has one. Don’t you want to meet your true love?”

 

“Who says I won’t? People had true love before timers, you know.”

 

Christina sniffs at her beer, nose screwed up like a puppy. She tastes a careful sip, immediately gagging. She doesn’t spit it out, but her face makes her opinion on the subject perfectly clear. He laughs, taking another long swing, as she places hers on the ground, careful not to spill. Points for that, in this heat he's too lazy to steal or pick pockets and too broke to afford even the cheap stuff.

 

“But it was so messy before,” she argues, still on the topic now that she's sunk her teeth in, “And you never knew for _sure_.”

 

Peter looks at her, eyes old. A saying goes that gypsies tie stories into their hair, so that they’re never lost in transit, in the continual tide-like certainly of moving on to the next place. Stories are important, and names. Fortune telling is just reading someone’s plot before it happens. The words gather in his mouth like spit, but he swallows. Some stories are too true to be told out loud.

 

“You say messy like it’s a bad thing,” Peter counters, and grins.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Pre-zero" just refers to people who are on the verge of "zero-ing out", aka having their countdown finish right before they meet their soulmate.

Correction: Roman isn’t the only one with a blank timer.

 

Letha was supposed to zero out two weeks after her seventeenth birthday, her father looming protectively over her shoulder, waiting for the right stranger to wander through their town. The celebration was planned, his mother even buying out the amusement park for the occasions.

 

Pre-zero reactions are as varied as people; Letha got happy.

 

She oozed it, shaking laughter from her hair, from the spaces between painted toes.Roman couldn’t stand being around her for long, and couldn’t keep himself away. Moths and flames, whatever. She is radiant. But then, spectral light is only seen when electrons are falling and this is unwritten law, that Godfrey's will get everything but what they want. 

 

Two days before zeroing out, Letha wakes up screaming—countdown frozen.

 

The Godfrey family goes on a manhunt. Any death within a travel radius of two days is investigated, mercilessly, with the intensity of a suicide mission. No concrete answers are found and the pursuit fades into apologies and numb silence.

 

Letha begins therapy, medication, testing (but that’s the one thing timers don’t come with—a cure) at the Tower. His uncle still hovers over her shoulder, smaller under the weight of his guilt. He puts up a token fight at Letha’s treatment but Olivia touches his shoulder, whispers something.  _Broken so easily,_ Roman thinks with contempt and maybe fear,  _it’s better like this_.

 

Moths and flames, though, and he finds Letha more beautiful than ever. She shaves her hair and her head seems rounder, eyes larger in her face, deeper like coins sinking to the bottom of a wishing well.

 

He is the first person she speaks to, almost three weeks after.

 

“I like the way you look at me,” she whispers, on the ride home from the hospital and he almost crashes, “Like I’m not broken.”

 

“You’re not,” he promises, and takes her hand.

 

XXX

 

He sees gypsy boy through a crowd of faceless people, Red Sea parting for maximum impact in the moment of exhale. They meet eyes for the time it takes smoke to dissipate into oxygen; his eyes are burning, he doesn’t blink.

 

His name is Peter, Roman learns later, but in the moment he is untitled, ineffable.

 

Roman goes to all of his classes, just to see if he’ll be there. He thinks about transferring science classes but the move reeks of desperation and, well, he has an image to uphold. He’s the guy with the blank timer; the one too cold for even a soulmate, (what are souls anyway, nobody explains that part) the one whose whole family never settled right. It's in the blood, it must be.

 

He liked to think it was a curse on the Godfrey family, when he was younger—curses can be broken.

 

Being social is not something he excels at, neither is reaching out. Roman thinks of a hundred ways to start a conversation, a hundred ways to approach; he’s afraid that he’ll open his mouth and say: “I can’t stop thinking about you. Let’s be friends.”

 

It’s easier than that it in the end, easy as exhaling. They meet for the first time at a crime scene and this feels like Irony or Fate.

 

“I thought you did it.”

 

Peter’s voice is somewhere between accusation and joke, half confession. It’s surreal, the two of them meeting here feeling predetermined, inescapable, mutual understanding having the flavor of dream-logic rather than a factual basis. Peter is not responsible, not the killer; this is unquestionable. It’s with this mindset, that this will end with alarm clock warnings like all dreams do, that Roman forgets about the consequences. Or, maybe, he’s showing off a little bit. Never with witnesses, that was his first rule, but Peter isn't just a witness.

 

Copper-tang heavy on the back of his tongue when he licks the trickling blood from his upper lip, he can’t help but be pleased with Peter’s reaction.

 

(Show me yours, I’ll show you mine.)

 

The air feels different, charged with static electricity and potential energy and his swollen gums ache and bleed when he brushes his teeth in the morning. He spits into the sink and heads to school.


	4. Chapter 4

“Want a ride?”

 

Peter’s gut reaction is _yes,_ before his judgment kicks in. He accepts anyway, because well, there’s something about Roman he’s compelled to give into. The word friendship is trapped under a glass cup in his mind; he’s trained to observe from the other side, barely brushing his ecosystem against the newest school environment, making as little impact as possible.

 

Still, Peter gets in the car. The door closes and the space between passenger and driver sparks alive. His skin is tight, not full-moon tight, but shallow-breathing tight.

 

“So, I should--” he says, voice low, forced from the back of his throat. Roman’s hands tighten around the wheel and he finds himself distracted by how the action makes the veins stand out under pale skin. “Give you, um. Directions?”

 

He finishes on a question, eyes darting from Roman’s hands to his face.

 

Roman’s mouth curls up like the edges of burnt paper. No dimples—Peter is surprised, and realizes he’s never been close enough to tell before. They’re close enough now. If the other boy had freckles, if he weren’t so porcelain white, unmarked, Peter could count them. But there are no freckles to be counted, which makes the whole train of thought rather pointless.

 

“I know where you live,” Roman says and exhales through his nose, smile dissipating like smoke. A glance is flicked his way, and Peter drops his gaze into his lap, heat creeping up his neck, caught staring. “Fuck, that sounded better in my head.”

 

Peter bites out a short laugh, still thinking about skin. “Nah, man. I’m shit at directions, anyway.”

 

It’s a lie, but the harsh twist of Roman’s mouth loosens.

 

The sight relaxes the tense set of his shoulders somewhat and Peter finally lets the arc of his back find the curve of the seat; it moulds against his aching spine like a hug. Not thinking, he lets his arms extend, joints popping, one in the open window and the other across the back of Roman’s seat.  

 

Peter freezes, prey-still before flight. He can feel the heat of Roman’s neck.

 

But Roman doesn’t comment, flicking another glance at him. With his chin, he gestures toward Peter’s shockingly naked wrist resting in the open window, his long-sleeved sleeve having rucked up to expose skin instead of screen.

 

“What’s your reason?” Roman asks, so causal Peter begins to answer before he knows what he’s doing.

 

“Too much trouble,” he says. It’s not the full answer, but it’s all truth.

 

Roman just nods.

 

The tips of his hair tickle against Peter’s arm, making his hair stand on end. He swallows against a throat that keeps closing. He licks his teeth; it’s a strange nervous habit. It runs in the family.

 

Roman’s eyes are dark, making it hard to tell, but Peter thinks his pupils are blown too wide for sunlight.  He’s being watched in the rearview mirror when Peter forces himself to look up, and the other boy breaks the gaze first. He licks his teeth again, fighting instinct.

 

(What his instincts are telling him exactly, is unclear.)

 

They don’t say much else.

 

But, later, when Peter falls asleep in his hammock looking up at the fattening moon, he touches two fingers to his skin of wrist and it feels raw.


End file.
